The road to Utopia is the road to Hell. — Communism and socialism are the opiates of the intelligentsia. — The left, in its eternal and futile quest for "equality", is more than willing to abolish liberty and sunder fraternity.

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The State of the Union: 2010

boils down to one thing: the use of government’s power to direct resources and people toward outcomes dictated by government. . . .

The particular set of outcomes toward which government should strive depends on the statist who happens to be expounding his views. But all of them are essentially alike in their desire to control the destiny of others. . . .

“Hard” statists thrive on the idea of a powerful state; control is their religion, pure and simple. “Soft” statists [sometimes] profess offense at the size, scope, and cost of government, but will go on to say “government should do such-and-such,” where “such-and such” usually consists of:

government grants of particular positive rights, either to the statist, to an entity or group to which he is beholden, or to a group with which he sympathizes

government interventions in business and personal affairs, in the belief that government can do certain things better than private actors, or simply should do many things other than — and sometimes in lieu of — dispensing justice and defending the nation.

Hard statists simply reject liberty. Soft statists reject it in fact even as they claim to embrace it in principle. Together, hard and soft statists have harnessed themselves and the liberty-loving minority to the yoke of the state. It is by this tyranny of the majority that America has descended into Europeanism, from which there can be no escape unless the liberty-loving minority begins actively to resist it — as did a similar minority in 1775.

If you are a “fish in water,” and cannot see the extent to which America is in thrall to statism — nationally, regionally, and locally — consider these examples of the ways in which statism grips us:

1. Compulsory public education has been used by statists to inculcate statism. Higher education — especially the so-called liberal arts — is dominated by the products of statist inculcation.

2. “Free enterprise” and freedom of personal action are barely more free than they were under Hitler or Mussolini. If you doubt that, consider the hundreds of thousands of pages comprised in the U.S. Code, its implementing regulations, and the statutes, codes, and ordinances of States and municipalities.

3. “Private property” has gone by the wayside, in company with “free enterprise,” thanks to the same enactments. If you doubt that, think about compulsory unionism, smoking bans, the continuing misuse of eminent domain, and various restrictions on the sale and use of personal and business property.

4. Productive Americans, on the whole, pay about half of their income to their governments, for the purpose of supporting the counterproductive activities of those governments and their clients. Some of those productive Americans endorse and support this confiscatory regime because (a) they don’t understand its costs and consequences; (b) it makes them feel good; and (c) they subscribe to the Nirvana fallacy, in which an all-good, all-knowing government can (somehow) do the “right” things and do them “right.” The persistence of the Nirvana fallacy owes much to compulsory public education (point 1).

5. Our prosperity, such as it is, waxes and wanes with the whims of the Federal Reserve, which has the power to inflate, to feed bubbles, to cause depressions, and to fund government’s profligate spending (where taxation is insufficient or politically unpopular).

6. Incentives to work and save — to be self-reliant, in other words — have been diminished by the establishment of welfare “rights,” Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. To this list has been added the expansion of Medicare-Medicaid known as Obamacare.

7. Affirmative action, equal lending opportunity, equal housing opportunity, and other “preference” schemes penalize the more-capable at the expense of the less-capable. In a single stroke, such schemes enable advancement based on personal characteristics instead of merit, while destroying freedom of association and freedom of contract.

8. Various legislative, executive, and judicial acts have led to a kind of perverted legality that requires prisoners to be released when prisons become “overcrowded”; allows unborn and partially born human beings to be killed on a whim; stifles the free expression of political views for which the Founders fought and suffered; and treats foreign enemies as mere criminals with the same jurisprudential rights as the American citizens whose lives and property they would destroy.

There is much more, but that is all I can bear to acknowledge in a single post.

Comments & Correspondence

Now that this blog is in hiatus, I have closed comments on all posts. If you wish to communicate privately, you may e-mail me at the Germanic nickname for Friedrich followed by the last name of the great Austrian economist and Nobel laureate whose first name is Friedrich followed by the 3rd and 4th digits of his birth year followed by the usual typographic symbol followed by the domain and extension for Google’s e-mail service — all run together.

On Liberty and Libertarianism

What is liberty? It is peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior.

John Stuart Mill opined that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." But who determines whether an act is harmful or harmless? Acts deemed harmless by an individual are not harmless if they subvert the societal bonds of trust and self-restraint upon which liberty itself depends.

Which is not to say that all social regimes are regimes of liberty. Liberty requires voice -- the freedom to dissent -- and exit -- the freedom to choose one's neighbors and associates. Voice and exit depend, in turn, on the rule of law under a minimal state.

Liberty, because it is a social phenomenon and not an innate condition of humanity, must be won and preserved by an unflinching defense of a polity that fosters liberty through its norms, and the swift and certain administration of justice within that polity. The governments in and of the United States have long since ceased to foster liberty, but most Americans are captives in their own land and have no choice but to strive for the restoration of liberty, or something closer to it.

Who can restore liberty? Certainly not the self-proclaimed libertarians who are fixated on Mill's empty harm principle and align with the left on social norms. Traditional (i.e., Burkean) conservatism fosters the preservation and adherence of beneficial norms (e.g., the last six of the Ten Commandments). Thus, by necessity, the only true libertarianism is found in traditional conservatism. I am a traditional conservative, which makes me a libertarian -- a true one.

Notes about Usage

“State” (with a capital “S”) refers to one of the United States, and “States” refers to two or more of them. “State” and “States,” thus used, are proper nouns because they refer to a unique entity or entities: one or more of the United States, the union of which, under the terms and conditions stated in the Constitution, is the raison d’être for the nation. I reserve the uncapitalized word “state” for a government, or hierarchy of them, which exerts a monopoly of force within its boundaries.

Marriage, in the Western tradition, predates the state and legitimates the union of one man and one woman. As such, it is an institution that is vital to civil society and therefore to the enjoyment of liberty. The recognition of a more-or-less permanent homosexual pairing as a kind of marriage is both ill-advised and illegitimate. Such an arrangement is therefore a “marriage” (in quotation marks) or, more accurately, a homosexual cohabitation contract (HCC).

The words “liberal”, “progressive”, and their variants are usually enclosed in quotation marks (sneer quotes) because they refer to persons and movements whose statist policies are, in fact, destructive of liberty and progress. I sometimes italicize the words, just to reduce visual clutter.

I have reverted to the British style of punctuating in-line quotations, which I followed 40 years ago when I published a weekly newspaper. The British style is to enclose within quotation marks only (a) the punctuation that appears in quoted text or (b) the title of a work (e.g., a blog post) that is usually placed within quotation marks.

I have reverted because of the confusion and unsightliness caused by the American style. It calls for the placement of periods and commas within quotation marks, even if the periods and commas don’t occur in the quoted material or title. Also, if there is a question mark at the end of quoted material, it replaces the comma or period that might otherwise be placed there.

If I had continued to follow American style, I would have ended a sentence in a recent post with this:

What a hodge-podge. There’s no comma between the first two entries, and the sentence ends with an inappropriate question mark. With two titles ending in question marks, there was no way for me to avoid a series in which a comma is lacking. I could have avoided the sentence-ending question mark by recasting the list, but the items are listed chronologically, which is how they should be read.

This not only eliminates the hodge-podge, but is also more logical and accurate. All items are separated by commas, commas aren’t displaced by question marks, and the declarative sentence ends with a period instead of a question mark.